By JAMES-CLIFTON SPIRES/Senior Staff Writer
MIDDLESBORO — If anyone thinks it’s hot now, wait until Nov. 6!
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear braved the late Wednesday afternoon heat to attend a local party fundraiser at the Middlesboro Civic Center.
Acknowledging the hundred-plus degree temperatures outside, Beshear warned that the governor’s race, which shows him leading incumbent Republican candidate Ernie Fletcher by double digits in all public opinion polls, is going to get hotter — and nastier — before General Election Day this fall.
“The polls all got us at 15 to 25 percentage points ahead — that’s the good news,” Beshear told the gathering of local registered Democrats — and a few Republicans — present. “The bad news, it’s August, not November.”
Beshear said he fully expects Fletcher and his supporters to try to close that gap with aggressive tactics, some of which may not be so nice.
“I’m running against an incumbent so desperate to keep his job, he’s willing to say anything to keep it,” Beshear said. “Well, for every lie they tell about us, we’ll tell the truth about them. And the truth about them is much worse than any lies they can tell about us.”
Beshear’s running mate for lieutenant governor, Daniel Mongiardo, also was scheduled to attend the event but was unable to because he was in Rome, Italy, following the death of his grandmother.
Beshear was critical of Fletcher for invoking his Fifth Amendment privilege under the Constitution during investigations into his administration’s hiring and firing policies during his term as governor.
“The Fifth Amendment protects someone against self-incrimination,” Beshear said. “If all you’re doing is being a witness, what do you have to worry about? Someone needs to tell Ernie that the Fifth Amendment is not a part of the 10 Commandments!”
Currently, the central issue in the campaign seems to be about casino gambling and Beshear’s advocacy of it as a way to bring tax dollars into the state. While interacting with local well-wishers at the event, Beshear said that “Seventy million dollars in charitable gaming profits is reported to the state this year.” Beshear has estimated Kentucky could take in at least $500 million in additional tax revenues with limited casino gambling.
When told that Bell County Judge Executive Albey Brock, a Fletcher supporter, and the county Fiscal Court recently voted to oppose “the expansion of gambling at off-track betting parlors established without local approval by a majority of the voters,” Beshear said, “That’s exactly what we’re advocating — allowing people the right to vote on casino gambling. If they don’t want it in their community, that’s OK. But if they do, they should be able to say so.”
Beshear said that he foresaw “no more than a dozen” casinos ever becoming reality in the state, “and most of them would probably be near race tracks.”
Fletcher is campaigning on a “No Casinos Tour,” despite the advice of Republican heavyweights such as U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, according to a Thursday report by the Associated Press.
“I advised him to allow it to be put on the ballot,” Bunning said in an interview before the annual country ham breakfast at the Kentucky State Fair. “I guess my word didn’t get through.”
“There are a lot of Republicans that think that’s the way it should be handled,” said Bunning, who endorsed Fletcher’s chief rival, former U.S. Rep. Anne Northup, in the GOP primary, but promptly endorsed Fletcher after the governor won renomination.
Not long after the primary, Fletcher came out strongly opposed to putting the expanded gambling issue on the ballot in Kentucky. Before then, the governor said he was personally opposed to casino gambling but would leave the issue up to the voters if a gambling referendum made it on the ballot.
In Pikeville Wednesday as part of his “No Casinos Tour,” Fletcher argued that casino gambling would bring more social ills to Kentucky, including higher crimes, bankruptcy and divorce.
Beshear says the extra tax revenue from casinos could be put toward education, health care, economic development and other initiatives.
“We’re at a crossroads in this state,” Beshear said at the Middlesboro fundraiser. “It’s time to end the nightmare that’s been going on.”
Beshear said that Fletcher and his party have tried to infer that they are the only ones who stand for family interests in the state.
“We’re not going to allow Ernie Fletcher and his bunch say you can’t be a Democrat and a Christian at the same time,” Beshear said.
On the subject of family values, Beshear told briefly about his childhood in Dawson Springs as one of five children of a lay Baptist minister who also was an undertaker.
“Daddy used to say he had the best of both worlds,” Beshear joked. “He got ‘em comin’ and goin’.”
“My daddy taught me about the 10 Commandments,” Beshear said. “He said, ‘Steve, it doesn’t matter where those 10 Commandments hang on the wall, it’s how you’re trying to live them.”
“If we strengthen our families in this state, then we can strengthen the people in this state and we can move ahead,” Beshear said.
He said it was through his parents that education was the key to success in life.
“The family is the social unit that forms the backbone of our society,” Beshear said, adding that education can help “single parents learn to raise a child properly” and can allow “poor people to get access to early childhood education.”
Early childhood education, Beshear said, “pulls children into the system at an early age to help them become responsible adults.”
Beshear said he wants to see the state use its funding — which could be increased by controlled casino gambling revenues — to help not only more Kentucky students gain college degrees but also to help create a greater emphasis on other kinds of educational training.
“For years, we have looked at vocational education and technical career education as a wasteland,” Beshear said, explaining that creating greater opportunities for such training can create a job market for companies needing local workers with modern job skills.
‘Right now, all we seem to do is offer tax incentives from outside the state to create jobs,” Beshear said. “After five years, they move on to Mexico and South America because the labor’s cheaper there. This needs to be a two-way deal. If a company doesn’t live up to its promises to create jobs, then they need to pay something back.”
Beshear said it is appalling that currently there are “550,000 Kentuckians without health care insurance, and 81,000 of them are children.” He said if elected governor, he believes the state can find ways to expand the present health care system to cover all 81,000 of the uninsured children at the very least.
Bruce Schreiner of the Associated Press contributed to this story.
James-Clifton Spires is senior staff writer for the Daily News. His e-mail address is jcspires@middlesborodailynews.com.
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